'Where Men Win Glory': Jon Krakauer's examination of the death of Pat Tillman

"Where Men Win Glory"

by Jon Krakauer

Doubleday, 383 pp., $27.95

In "Where Men Win Glory," Jon Krakauer examines the killing by friendly fire of professional football player Pat Tillman, combining empathy and extensive reporting in an affecting portrait of the victim and a bitter condemnation of the cover-up that followed his death while on duty in Afghanistan.

Krakauer also ties the tragedy into a long line of U.S. misfires with the Taliban and al-Qaida — a pointed exercise at a time when the Afghanistan campaign is losing political and public support.

The author of "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air," and a former Seattleite, Krakauer tries to show what sort of man is persuaded by the Sept. 11 attacks to turn down a $3.6 million football contract and enlist for three years in the Army.

Growing up near San Jose, Calif., Tillman was a smart, rambunctious teen who enjoyed challenging himself and others both physically and intellectually. He kept a diary at 16, as he would keep a journal when he joined the Arizona Cardinals and in the military.

His one black mark was a vicious beating he gave at age 17 to another high schooler in an incident that threatened Tillman with serious legal problems. In the sort of irony Krakauer usually seizes on but ignores here, it was a case of mistaken identity — as was Tillman's death 10 years later.

"Jessica Lynch hoax"

Tillman was in a Ranger unit when the Iraq War's "shock and awe" began on March 20, 2003. His platoon was prepared to parachute into the initial assaults but was held back. A week and a half later he was an ancillary part of the successful mission to rescue Private Jessica Lynch, famously taken prisoner on March 23 after a disastrous U.S. foray in southern Iraq and a string of fiascos during the next few days that mainly involved allied forces shooting, bombing and killing one another.

Lynch gave the Bush White House an opportunity to distract Americans from the bad news with what Krakauer calls an "extravagantly embellished" account of her "ordeal" and rescue.

"The Jessica Lynch hoax worked so well," Krakauer writes "that the White House would recycle the same tactic 13 months later, almost move for move, when it was confronted with another series of potentially disastrous revelations."

On April 28, 2004, the day Tillman's body came home from Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib torture story broke on network television. The Iraq war itself had taken one of its worst turns with the 27-day assault on Fallujah, starting April 4, after four Blackwater USA contractors were killed, burned and hung from a bridge.

24 hours

Although it knew within 24 hours of Tillman's death that the cause was friendly fire, the military withheld the information from the Tillman family for weeks.

Tillman was awarded a Silver Star with essentially false witness statements. A Navy SEAL was deceived into rendering a false memorial tribute about how he died. His uniform and body armor were removed, contrary to protocol, and burned before he was sent to the autopsy site. The Army withheld from the medical examiners that the cause of death was friendly fire, another breach of protocol.

After the official press conference announcing that "Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire," Krakauer writes, "perception managers from the Pentagon congratulated each other for limiting the damage."

Tillman's death was the culmination of another chain of bureaucratic and military snafus, especially a "sense of urgency" that "came from little more than a bureaucratic fixation on meeting arbitrary deadlines," Krakauer writes.

The author's tone often grows strident and can spark skepticism just at those times when he'd be better off letting the evidence speak for itself.

The facts do speak eloquently, sadly — as when Krakauer notes that friendly fire was involved in 21 percent of casualties, both fatal and nonfatal, in World War II, 39 percent in Vietnam, 52 percent in the first Gulf War, 41 percent so far in Iraq and 13 percent in Afghanistan.

The numbers of course don't make Tillman and his death any less exceptional.